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What I’m Reading Right Now

I hoard information. I find all kinds of things interesting, and I aspire to do more with
all those things than I actually manage to do. So today I thought I’d chalk up the things
I’m reading, or unrealistically think I’ll be reading soon.

Browser Tabs

I have 30 browser tabs open at this moment. Many of these tabs have been open for weeks.
Some of them I have read and have planned to blog about. Some of them are references I
have consulted, and some of them are just open because I have planned to read them, or
simply because I want to be reminded of the topic contained in those tabs. Here goes:

This is currently my only pinned tab. I generally always have Google+ open in a pinned
tab. I don’t use gmail’s web client anymore, and so G+ is where my google talk chats
now happen.

Why Bret? I got to meet Bret via google hangout just a few days ago. It was my first
Google hangout evar. In the background behind Bret, I could see huge legos, which he
explained his company uses to create partition walls for work spaces. Envy? Well, yeah.

2. iGoDigital

This is an Indianapolis company. I’m interested in working in the Indianapolis area,
and I hear this is an awesome company. They are looking for a backend ruby developer.
Hmmm.

Another awesome Indianapolis company. I mean, I’ve heard. I haven’t met them yet.

4. Indy Hackers

The creator of Indy Hackers is Miles Sterrett, who is the guy
who recommended I take a look at the companies in tabs 2 & 3. Miles is cool. He’s a
ruby developer, and an organizer of the ruby users group here in Indianapolis.

This may be my oldest currently open tab. I was fascinated by this essay/talk by Dr.
Edsger Dijkstra, written way back in 1988, the year I graduated from highschool.

Dijkstra basically says that computing science is extremely weird, and it is ineffective
(and therefore “cruel”) to attempt to teach new students this new field by building
off of metaphors from other disciplines. Computing science is so conceptually out in
left field, that most metaphors end up confusing the student one way or another.

This has been my experience. So I agree 100%. As an alternative to teaching what
computing science is “like”, Dijkstra proposes the student must be given an environment
in which to just begin messing about with computing science. Setup a relatively
simple set of constraints, and let them play with it.

I am intrigued with this essay because my initial reaction was guardedly negative.
The reason for this is that I am a big believer in the power of metaphors. I still
am. Metaphors, I feel we could argue, literally are the way that we learn things.

But at the same time, I seen over and over again that metaphors cannot always take us
to comprehensive understanding. So while I believe in the strength and importance of
metaphor, I also believe that genuine learning is always experiential.

I was also fascinated by this essay because I am an agile software development coach
who has seen many, many examples of people who do not understand what agile is about,
or who think they understand it, even as they squeeze a few agilish metaphors into
their predeliction to a mindset which is profoundly un-agile.

Is it possible that agile is like computing science in this way? Perhaps the use of
metaphors ultimately confounds the new student to agile, and that actually messing
around with agile is the only way to really come to understand it.

The previous seven paragraphs barely scratch the surface of what I’d like to explore
vis a vis this essay. No wonder this tab stayed open so long.

I met David Baldwin at the ruby meetup back in July. And because I was struggling
with getting smart quotes (curly quotes) to work with this blog, I was intrigued
when this gem was mentioned. This was over a month ago. Smart quotes still do not
work on this blog.

I love this rant. I first encountered it via somebody’s Google+ post or tweet or
some such thing, and really like what Bret Victor has to say about hands and
interaction design. He made me despise my iPad just a little tiny bit, and made
me restless for something more. Way to go, Bret!

I recently (read several weeks ago) looked up this rant again because I wanted to
send it to Marty Thompson of DK New Media. Several weeks ago,
I dropped into their office to introduce myself to Doug Karr, and
that’s when I met Marty.

Marty is very tech saavy, but he’s also got that quirky neo-luddite streak that
seems to charactarize so many of the best geeks. He’s an avid re-enactor, and a
craftsman as well. He likes physical tools. And so naturally this made me think
of Bret’s rant. Eventually I’ll get around to forwarding this over to Marty.

Ok, I will admit that I’m a little sheepish about using zombie lore to test and
sharpen my ruby, rails and rspec know-how. But on the other hand, it’s nice
to know that in a zombie apocolypse, I’ll have the finely honed coding skills
I’ll need to survive.

I am a fan and a user of vim. I’m writing this blog post in vim right now. I
spent six very unfocused months re-deploying my blog on Nesta just so that I
could use Vim and git to edit and manage my blog.

But there are always a few odd things that I’ve never quite learned to do in
Vim, and believe it or not, using the <leader> is one of those things. I’ll
get this squared away soon, and then I can kill this tab.

I think I found my way onto this site via Code School. Currently
I’m contemplating a job in Souix Falls, South Dakota. I am not interested in
relocating to Souix Falls, however. So honestly, I don’t really know why this
tab is still open. Probably because I want to keep the site itself on the stove
for (near) future reference.

11. Ruby On Rails API Reference

Apparently I’m right in the middle of reading about ActionView’s JavaScriptHelper.
Or I was several weeks ago. Oh well. The rails API is not a bad thing to have perma-tabbed.
Maybe I’ll pin this one.

As I said earlier, I love Vim, and want to become a better, more powerful user of Vim.
But I have to be honest about this: I am no Vim Maven (say that 10 times fast). So
quite a while back, I decided to just adopt AkitaOnRails’ Vim dotfiles
as my own. But there is so much I do not understand about that config set, and I am
always on the lookout for a better, more comprehensible way. And since I figure that
CarlHuda is a very smart…entity, I thought I’d give Janus a spin.

Ok, wow, Bob Marshall really un-corked something for me here. I
disagree! I strongly disagree! Or possibly not! After more than three weeks,
I don’t clearly remember what I thought about this blog post, but I do know that
Bob set in motion my reading oddyssy which spans the next couple of tabs.

Basically, I think Bob is talking about \<vague_idea\>mindsets, paradigms, cultures,
mental frameworks, and the way that systems of ideas evolve.\</vague_idea recommendation="read it for yourself"\>

I object to the idea put forth by others (not necessarily Mr. Marshall) in this
school of thought which holds that ideas evolve to adapt to current conditions, and
thus the notion that value judgements can be made about systems of ideas is false.

I disagree. I think we can and must make value judgements about systems of ideas
(I’m doing it right now!). And to say that any system of thought which arises is
perfectly valid in context is to embrace the moral calamity of Hitler’s Nazism,
Eugenics and the Great Crusades alike.

I am pretty sure I’m making a soapbox out of what Bob really just meant as a
commentary on the Agile/Lean software movement. But that’s what I do.

Believe it or not, my reading rainbow led me from Bob Marshall’s “Mindset” all
the way to a Wikipedia-fueled crash course on Karl Popper. I don’t quite remember how
it happened.

I may have to officially declare this a rabbit trail, but gosh darnit, it’s an
interesting one. I am a fan and practitioner of Test Driven Development, and I think
Karl Popper should be interesting to any TDD’er.

Popper did a ton of really smart stuff, but he is probably most well-known for his
philosophical work around the idea of falsifiability. Basically he proposes that
we have knowledge not by virtue of the things we can prove to be true, but rather
by the things we can prove false. Or, to put it another way, it is impossible to
ultimately prove anything is true. But we can get a lot done by proving what is
false.

This resonated with me as a Test Driver of software because I recognized the same
delemma when writing and testing software. When we conceive, write and execute
tests, we are proving not so much what the software will do, but what it won’t
do.

I think this is because in TDD, we begin by writing a failing test. Thus our
software begins by failing, and by correcting the failure, we’re allowing the test
to prove one thing which our software won’t do.

This makes me think of Douglas Adams and gravity. Which is yet another rabbit
trail.

This is another one of those perennial tabs. Currently I’m mapping the distance
from my house to the Indianapolis offices of Blackbaud. Hmmm, 37 miles, very
manageable. I drove further than that today.

Somehow I got turned onto a Vanity Fair article about Julia Childs.
I am not a particularly good cook, and I don’t really have the bug to become
one. But I think I am fascinated by Julia because she was openly a learner.
She started out as not an expert, and then she became an expert at something.
And if you read her story, you can watch it happen, which I find engrossing.

I clicked an ad from LinkedIn. Gahhh! Feels like failure! But I am
interested in what they’re doing with professional mentors, so I applied.
At the end of the month I will have an interview with them, and if I pass
their mentor muster, I may be mentoring with them.

And Next, The Kindle

I had intended to proceed from the blog tabs on to my current stack of eBooks
in progress, but my, how the time flies! I will save my reading list for a
future post. Now I must go close some of those tabs. Chrome is hogging all my
memory!

Some great estates provide, but do not breed
A mast'ring mind; so both are lost thereby:
Or else they breed them tender, make them need
All that they leave: this is flat poverty.
For he, that needs five thousand pound to live,
Is full as poor as he, that needs but five.